An email service is used to send out the system emails that confirm a partner’s registration, the admittance to a program, the creation of a payment entry, etc. It is also used for the newsletters of your advertisers. You can create more than one service, to make sure every advertiser in your platform can send and receive emails via their own preferred email address. The email service you assign as default will always send out the system emails.
Make sure you are logged in to your admin account and go to the administration section of the navigation menu. Click on ‘configuration’ in the main navigation menu and proceed to click on ’email services’. If you do so, you will see a page looking more or less like this:
The page offers you an overview of all the email services that have been created so far. From left to right, you will find the following elements:
The email service type, i.e. the type of system providing the email service.
The name of the email service.
A brief description of a the email service.
The email address that will be displayed as sender to the person receiving the email.
If the email service is the default service, you will find a icon in the next column.
Under ‘log’, you can find a brief report for the emails that have been sent out via this service. If you see the , no emails using this service were sent yet. If you see the icon, all emails were sent successful. The icon indicates errors have occurred. In case you need further details, just click on the icons and a panel will open up containing the time and date of the last emails sent via this service. In case of errors, you will also find a brief error report explaining what went wrong.
Finally, the and the icons allow you to edit and delete the email service respectively.
To create a new email service, click on the button ‘create new service’ in the right top corner of the overview page. If you do so, a page will appear with a form containing all the basic characteristics of your email service:
First, you will need to define a service type. The service type represents the type of system providing the email service. The platform currently supports SMTP, Amazon SES, Mandrill and Mailjet. If you are using Gmail, choose SMTP. Please note the form will change depending on the type you choose.
If the service you are creating should be the default email service, please tick the corresponding box. Please remember the default email service will be used for the system emails (registration, admittance, financial issues, etc.) and for any advertiser you did not create an additional service for.
It is recommended to give your email service a name that makes the purpose of your service clear at a glance. If you want to use it for one specific advertiser only, make sure you use this advertiser’s name.
Details can be documented in the description, but this field is not mandatory.
What sending settings you need to fill out depends on the service type you have defined. You can fill out the following fields for all types, although only the second field is mandatory:
The name of the email address from which you will send emails, as it will be displayed in the email system of the partners.
The email address from which you will send emails, as it will be displayed in the email system of the partners.
The name of the email address to which the partners can reply.
The email address to which the partners can reply. This does not have to be a real address, you can also use a blocking address such as noreply@example.com.
When you are using SMTP as service type, you can proceed with the rest of the form, which is discussed in detail below. The other service types can be completed by filling out the following fields:
If you have selected Amazon SES as service type, you will also need to fill out the access key, the secret key and the API endpoint supplied by Amazon SES as well. To find out how to get this data, please read the documentation of Amazon SES.
If you have selected Mandrill as service type, you will need to fill out the API key supplied by Mandrill. For more information, please read the Mandrill documentation.
If you have selected Mailjet as service type, you will need to fill out the secret key and the API key supplied by Mailjet. For more information, please read the Mailjet documentation.
When you did not select SMTP as a service type, the form is ready. Please do not forget to click ‘save’ in the right lower corner of the page.
Please note filling out this section is only relevant when you have selected SMTP as your service type. In this section, you need to supply the following information:
First, you need to fill out the SMTP host of the system you are using, for example smtp.gmail.com.
Subsequently, you need to fill out the port number and the protocol used by your provider. Usually, these settings are interdependent: when you are using an SSL protocol, you will need to use 465 as a port number in most cases. If you are using a TLS protocol, you will probably need to use 587 as your port number.
If your email provider requires a username and a password, please fill them out and do not forget to select the box ‘authentication‘.
In some cases, your email provider will require a message ID header. This is a message which is send out with every request and is used for identification.
Please note filling out this section is only relevant when you have selected SMTP as your service type. This section defines how emails will be sent out. Under’package size’, you define the number of emails that your provider allows you to send out per request. Under ‘wait for’, you define the interval between these packages.
When you are ready, please don’t forget to click on ‘save’ in the right lower corner of the page.